Defending the Christian faith and promoting its wisdom against the secular and religious challenges of our day.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Dogs, “Junk” DNA and Design

Intra-species variation doesn’t mean evolution. To put it
another way, even though we find tremendous variation among dogs – this
includes wolves, coyotes and foxes – it doesn’t mean that all of the assembly
information (DNA) evolved through random mutation. In fact it couldn’t have!
Bruce Malone, Search for the Truth
Ministries (TRUTH@SEARCHFORTHETRUTH.NET), writes in his newsletter:

All
biologists and geneticists now know that every dog on the planet
originated less than 10,000 years ago as a result of the selection of
information contained within the genetic code of a wild grey
wolf…Absolutely no evolution of information has happened – just a sorting
of the many characteristics needed to produce the various breeds of dogs and
wild canines of today.

This means that the great variation noted within various
emerging sub-species does not require a lengthy process and a macro-evolutionary
explanation. Instead, variation – as in the case of the canine family – can be
explained as a product of the design and genetic inheritance of the original
wolf. If so much information can be packed into one genome, perhaps Noah’s Ark was big enough!

Within the same newsletter (Winter 2012) Malone writes about
the fallacy of “junk DNA”:

For
over twenty years, it has been widely reported that less than 2% of the
coded information on the human DNA molecule is used to produce
proteins…Thus 98% of the DNA sequence was assumed to be useless leftover
junk from our evolutionary past. This was accepted evolutionary dogma for
many years…Even within the last 5 years, Dr. Francis Collins (head of the
human genome project), stated in his book, The Language of God, that
roughly 45% of the human genome is made up of repetitive flotsam and
jetsam and that this junk provides “compelling” evidence for the
evolutionary origin of humanity. Yet we can now conclusively show that
essentially all the DNA’s coded sequence (including repetitive sections)
serves multiple purposes and functions.

If the presence of “junk” DNA – leftover non-functioning DNA
from ancestral life-forms – argues in favor of evolution, then the lack of such
should argue against evolution! This absence of junk DNA should also argue that
we aren’t the result of a mindless, purposeless process but of Intelligent
design!

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